


The High Stakes of Lilies

by kathium



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Getting Together, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25389670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathium/pseuds/kathium
Summary: Nicolo believes that he has killed Yusuf twenty-two times, and that Yusuf has killed him twenty-one times. Yusuf knows that Nicolo is correct about the second number, but not the first. The score is, in fact, much more in Nicolo’s favor.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 49
Kudos: 500





	The High Stakes of Lilies

**Author's Note:**

> It might be trope-y trash but it’s my trope-y trash thank you very much. I’ve never written fanfic before but it occurred to me that combining the hanahaki trope with The Old Guard’s immortality might lead to some interesting narrative possibilities and so here we are.

Nicolo believes that he has killed Yusuf twenty-two times, and that Yusuf has killed him twenty-one times. Nicolo is proud in a way that Yusuf finds unreasonably endearing that the score is slightly in his favor. 

Especially since Yusuf knows that Nicolo is correct about the second number, but not the first. The score is, in fact, _much_ more in Nicolo’s favor. 

Yusuf has killed Nicolo twenty-one times, but Nicolo has killed Yusuf _fifty-six_ times. 

_It will soon be fifty-seven,_ Yusuf thinks, as he coughs up another white flower petal. Although he’s not sure it entirely counts if Nicolo doesn’t even know that he’s killing him, if it’s really more that Yusuf’s body is doing the work for him. 

It’s been almost nine months since the last time Nicolo killed Yusuf on purpose, nine months since they threw their weapons to the sand, exhausted of the endless cycle of blood and more blood and painful injuries and even more painful healings. They’d met each other in combat many times by then, and each time found themselves utterly ignoring the rest of the battle in favor of fighting only each other. Between the fighting, between the deaths, between the horror of coming to understand that somehow, neither opponent would seem to die—or at least, not for long—there’d been moments of talking. The talking started as nothing more than the most vicious insults they could come up with, meant to hurt as much as their blades, but then by the third day they’d fallen into competitive teasing in bits of Italian and Arabic and the few words of Occitan they found they both knew. If someone had heard only the words spoken in their last fight, they might have guessed the two speakers to be old friends, even though that most violent dance, too, ended in both Yusuf and Nicolo bleeding out.

It’s been nine months since Yusuf, in broken Italian, suggested they head east. They can’t stay with their camps anymore, both have drawn too much attention for the way they return each day bloody but unharmed. Yusuf had stumbled over his limited Italian vocabulary that he’d learned as a merchant’s apprentice—many words relating to spices, not near so many relating to emotional appeals—as he tried to convince Nicolo to come with him, desperately hoping the other man would agree, desperately hoping the other man wouldn’t notice his desperation. 

Because if Yusuf is going, he wants Nicolo there too, someone to talk to, someone who understands. Understands the whole not-dying thing, yes, but also understands _him_ , and this man, this foreign invader, who can speak maybe thirty words of Arabic and one of them is Yusuf’s name, who he’s only known for the week and a half they’ve spent repeatedly killing each other, this _man_ , already, somehow, understands Yusuf like no one else he’s ever met. Nicolo knows the way he moves, can often anticipate his attacks, will surprise him with a feint, will laugh at Yusuf’s clumsy taunts even while dodging his blade. To spar with Nicolo has become something of a joy, to fight with a partner of equal skill, to give the fight everything he has, to know they can hurt each other and yet survive. And Yusuf doesn’t want to be alone.

And so Yusuf asks, and Nicolo agrees, with a sun bright smile. 

  


xxxxx

  


They’ve been traveling vaguely east since then, in search of a city the crusades haven’t touched. They spend their days talking, on a hundred different topics, in a mix of languages. Yusuf’s Italian is improving daily even if his accent is not, Nicolo’s Arabic is coming along slower, but the words he can say, he pronounces almost flawlessly, and he can understand much more than he can speak. Nicolo has a good ear for languages, and for music. A few weeks after they started traveling together, Yusuf hears him singing softly while gathering wood for their fire. When he demands to hear more, Nicolo blushes a deep red, but finally continues, louder, a hymn in Latin. 

Yusuf can’t understand a word, but that night he coughs up his first singular white lily petal. Rare as the disease is, he’s still almost surprised it’s taken his body this long to manifest his futile longing into flower petals.

Hanahaki doesn’t usually progress so quickly from petals to full blooms. But only a week later, Nicolo dies again, but for the first time, not at Yusuf’s hand. And for that heavy moment between death and resurrection, Yusuf doesn’t know if Nicolo will wake. What if their new and confusing immortality applies only to the deaths they gift each other? What if this death, at some stranger’s hands, is finally permanent?

Then Nicolo breathes again, and for a second Yusuf is almost faint with relief. Together they slaughter the guard who had recognized Nicolo’s sword as one belonging to a crusader and had immediately drawn his own weapon. Yusuf knows his rage against the guard is tied to his feelings for Nicolo, which have grown from a simmering attraction to a hopeless love in the months they’ve now traveled together. He only hopes he hasn’t revealed in too much in the fact that his first instinct upon seeing Nicolo fall was to pull the other man into his arms and beg in Arabic whispers for him to wake.

Of course, he’s forgotten just how much Arabic Nicolo has learned by that point, and that night he coughs up a fully grown lily.

But it _is_ a hopeless love, Yusuf believes. He’d long known that love, whenever it found him, would not take the form of a woman. He’d already known that love, if it found him, would not be returned or be able to be acted upon, for this fact. So it’s an exquisite pain to find love in Nicolo, who he’s now learned was a priest before he joined the crusaders.

  


xxxxx

  


It’s been nine months since they’ve been traveling together and in that time haven’t separated for more than a few hours. These months have been the happiest Yusuf has ever been, and now he worries for the future in a way he never has. When he was—mortal—he knew the path his life would take. Soldier, merchant if he survived that, unhappy husband, father, grandfather if he got lucky, death. And now, none of that. 

Well, he’s glad to know he won’t have to pretend to love a wife, but the new absence of the rest of it is unsettling at the least. So he’s happy now, but how long will that happiness last? For the first time, he feels greedy in seeking those happy moments. He will live a long, long time, maybe forever, although that’s too large a concept to think about. And in that stretch of years and years he sees before him, he wants Nicolo there beside him, to talk to, to fight alongside, to sleep next to under the sky.

 _Let us face one eternity together, never make me leave your side,_ he prays. 

Which is exactly the problem. When he’d heard tales of the flower-sickness before, he’d never understood why a person, wasting away, wouldn’t confess their love in hopes that they had made a mistake and their love was in fact returned, thus curing themselves of the disease. If the love was unrequited then they’d die, but that _was what they would’ve done anyway._ On the other hand, they might live, the flowers in their chest would wither away, and they would get to share a love like in the stories Yusuf’s mother had told him as a child when he couldn’t sleep. So as a boy, he’d promised himself: if he got Hanahaki, he would confess.

Immortality makes everything more complicated. The stakes are so much higher than he could have dreamed of as a child. If he confesses and Nicolo loves him back—what sweeter fate than this, to love forever and not lose love to time and death? Yusuf knows with a certainty deeper than the sea that he could love Nicolo for an eternity, easily.

But if he confesses and Nicolo doesn’t return his feelings, if Nicolo turns him away? If Nicolo looks upon him with hate, with disgust, if he forces Yusuf to leave him? No death to erase his feelings and him along with them, no, Yusuf will love Nicolo anyway and will live a long time to love him, even if rejected. 

Hanahaki has already killed him thirty-four times, but each time Yusuf chokes on lilies, he wonders if this will truly be the last time. Will Hanahaki eventually overtake his strange immortality? If Nicolo rejects him, will he spend the next hundred years coughing on lily petals? Two hundred years? Will he spend all those years alone?

The balance is no longer potentially finding happiness against succumbing to the thing that was already killing you. It’s the barest chance of a love that might really last forever against an endless loneliness. The stakes are too high to fathom, and Yusuf doesn’t know what to do.

  


xxxxx

  


Hanahaki might not kill him, but Yusuf is still running out of time. He can’t keep hiding the bloody petals from Nicolo forever, the other man has already started to worry about Yusuf’s constant cough.

“ _Are you still sick, Yusuf? How is that even possible?_ ” He’d asked in halting Arabic. “ _Please, how can I help?_ ”

“ _It’s nothing,_ ” Yusuf had responded in Italian. “ _The wounds we get still hurt, don’t they? So it must still be possible to be ill. But it won’t kill me, don’t worry, I’m fine._ ”

Actually Yusuf has no idea if that’s true. Other than Yusuf’s Hanahaki, neither have fallen sick yet. And just because the flower-sickness hasn’t permanently killed him so far doesn’t mean it might not in the future—the Hanahaki is definitely getting worse. 

By the time they’ve been traveling for ten months together, the only clear, deep breaths Yusuf can take happen in the first few moments after he wakes from yet another Hanahaki death. Within minutes, he feels the growth heavy in his lungs again, within an hour he’s hacking up petals. He chokes to death at least once a day. 

One night, when Yusuf stumbles back to camp, after having rushed away muttering a nonsense excuse to get away from Nicolo so he could choke to death for the third time that day, Nicolo confronts him.

“ _I know you’re trying to hide it from me, but I know. I know you have the flower-sickness, Yusuf._ ” Nicolo takes a deep breath. “ _And if—and if you’re hiding it from me—Yusuf, who is it? Who is it that you love?_ ” 

And Yusuf is exhausted, from the coughing and the dying and the pretending, from keeping himself in check at all times, from the always denied desire to hold Nicolo, to kiss him, to confess. So he lies.

“ _It’s no one you know._ ” He tries to think of an excuse. “ _It’s... someone I knew from before the war. A woman. Who I was supposed to marry._ ”

In that moment, Yusuf cannot look at Nicolo, and so misses the expression of shock and pain that crosses the other man’s face.

“ _I’m going to sleep,_ ” he continues, desperately wanting to end this conversation. “ _I’m tired._ ”

And he leaves Nicolo standing there. 

  


xxxxx

  


The next morning, Yusuf cooks breakfast while Nicolo packs up their things. They talk as easily as they always have, and Yusuf is thankful beyond words their dynamic hasn’t changed. Yusuf makes a joke and Nicolo throws back his head and laughs and Yusuf is in love, love, _love,_ but then—Nicolo coughs.

And coughs and falls to his knees, and then—coughs up an entire purple iris. 

“ _Nicolo...?_ ” Yusuf finally gives in and pulls Nicolo into his arms as he’s wanted to do for so long, holding him gently as the other man shudders through violent coughs and more bloody petals before falling silent.

Nicolo turns to him, and Yusuf’s heart breaks to see tear tracks through the desert dust on his face. _Is he in love with someone else?_

“ _It’s you,_ ” Nicolo whispers. “ _It’s you, I love you, I’m in love with you, I know—I know you don’t feel the same but I love you, Yusuf al-Kaysani._ ” He presses one hand to his face and wipes away the tears. “ _I love you and I had to tell you so._ ”

Oh, Yusuf’s beloved is brave, braver than Yusuf to speak the truth, and Yusuf is in love, love, love. 

“ _I lied, Nicolo, I‘m sorry, it was you, it was always you, I love you too,_ ” Yusuf feels the sharpest joy in his chest, knows the lilies in his lungs are fading, fading. “ _Nicolo di Genova, I love you._ ”

Nicolo’s eyes widen in surprise and then they’re kissing, Yusuf feels Nicolo’s arms embrace him, they’re kissing, Nicolo laughs into Yusuf’s mouth and Yusuf feels it in his entire body.

“ _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was so afraid you wouldn’t love me back that I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want you to leave me,_ ” Yusuf says as they break apart.

“ _Never, Yusuf, I’ll never leave you,_ ” Nicolo kisses him on the brow.

  


xxxxx

  


When Yusuf finally confesses the true number of times Nicolo has killed him, how far Hanahaki pushed the score in his favor, Nicolo makes a point of kissing him once for each lonely, flower scented death, but then laughs and laughs. He’ll tease Yusuf over the score for a long, long time.


End file.
